the motherboard of a dedicated server I'm renting since five years went south and the motherboard got replaced by a new one. The very old (Debian) distro couldn't keep up with all the new hardware on the motherboard so I decided to re-install a new distro (Debian Wheezy) from scratch (even doing an upgrade was kinda problematic seen that the old Debian wouldn't recognize the ethernet chipset of the new motherboard as far as I can tell, so I went for a re-install from scratch).

I re-installed SVN and did get all the repositories by doing a:

tar -xzf repoBackups.tgz

And it "works".

The problem is that although, say, Eclipse recognizes the SVN repositories, it wants to commit every single file, even though they are identical.

Could this be related to timestamps on the files? Either way, do you have an idea as to what caused this and how to solve the issue?

I could simply ask everybody to re-commit every single file of every project and I think everything would be ok but some of these projects are quite big and it would be a bit painful for the developers.

As a bonus (and less important) question: would another VCS like Git or Mercurial not "suffer" from this problem?

Which files to commit is a client-side decision, not server-side. And its done based on comparing the files with the cached copy in .svn (timestamps do not matter, AFAIK. At least, touch did not make it want to commit a file). What does the command-line tool say, e.g., when you run svn status ?
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derobertMay 1 '13 at 16:54

Does the same happen if you make a new checkout?
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jofelMay 1 '13 at 18:34

@derobert: (and jofel) : I don't have any old projects checked out on my system (I don't work on these, I just helped configure the server). The devs are remotely located, I'll ask them to try "svn status" (but they're not super experienced with SVN, nor am I, they simply use it from Eclipse). Good to know it's purely a client-side decision: it's weird because one dev told me he compared the files and they were identical, yet Eclipse / SVN wanted everything to be commited again. I'll have them "svn status" and report to me : )
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Cedric MartinMay 1 '13 at 21:14